Congress Wants to Steal $1.68 Billion from Iran

It’s not enough to want untold thousands to die and the country destroyed, now neocons in Congress want to steal more than a billion and a half dollars from Iran as compensation for something somebody else did or didn’t do.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday to make $1.68 billion worth of Iranian funds available to the families of 241 American servicemen killed in the 1983 suicide bombing on a Marine base in Beirut, Lebanon.

In Trump Bizarro World, as in the Obama and Bush versions of the same, reality and facts are only applicable when they serve the agenda.

For instance:

The Iranian regime founded and supported the terror group responsible for the attack, Hezbollah. Multiple court decisions have authorized that Iranian funds be seized and given to the victim’s families.

It looks like the Daily Caller is going for The Washington Post Fake News Award, or one similar handed out by The Atlantic Council with the help of the Rockefeller Bros.

First and foremost, Hezbollah was not founded by Iran. It is certainly funded by Iran in much the same way the US funds Israel.

If Israel hadn’t invaded Lebanon in 1982, there would today be no Hezbollah. Hezbollah began as a Shia resistance to Israel’s invasion and mistreatment of Shias in Southern Lebanon.

Second point. It is not conclusively known what group or country is responsible for the bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut back in 1983.

At the time, Reagan’s Vice President Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane decided to blame Iran and Syria for the attack and a second on the US embassy in Lebanon. The US later said elements that would become Hezbollah were responsible.

“Hezbollah’s track record on terror is largely speculative,” I wrote in April. “There is no evidence the group kidnapped the president of the American University in Beirut, Davis S. Dodge, or is there conclusive evidence it attacked the US embassy in Beirut or truck bombed a US military barracks in Lebanon.”

The US said the Islamic Jihad, a little-known group that claimed responsibility for the attacks, was actually Hezbollah, an organization that did not yet exist. Hezbollah formed in 1985.

The attacks allowed the US and France to collaborate on attacking Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. The USS New Jersey fired hundreds of shells at Druze and Syrian positions.

“In a nine-hour period, the USS New Jersey fired 288 16-inch rounds, each one weighing as much as a Volkswagen Beetle. In those nine-hours, the ship consumed 40 percent of the 16-inch ammunition available in the entire European theater,” write Martin and Walcott in Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism.

The target was Syria. If the US-Israeli plan for the Middle East was to be realized, Hafez al-Assad’s influence in Lebanon would need to be terminated.

The first step was to kill Syrian commanding officers by lobbing 30 or more shells at a command center in the Shouf mountains.

Many Shia and Druze civilians were killed in the effort by the US, France, and the Lebanese Army to eliminate the influence of Syria in the artificially created state of Lebanon carved out of Syria decades before by the French.

All of the above historical information is easily available on the Internet. Is it too much to ask corporate media journalists to do their homework? Or is putting things in their proper historical and political context a conspiracy theory?

At the absolute minimum, they should mention the fact the Marine barracks and US embassy bombings have not been conclusively linked to Hezbollah, a group that did not exist at the time.

Of course, I don’t expect this to happen under the current propaganda system imposed by the State and its corporate media.

If a professional journalist wants to keep his or her job, they read the script.

It’s not the truth, at best half-truth. It is deception.

It’s the manipulation of millions of people to gain their acquiescence for the unimaginable—bombing sorties, cruise missiles, the drones of Hell unleashed, and the mangled and dismembered bodies of men, women, and children Mike Pence and John Bolton will never see.